Congress appeared close Monday to breaking its seven-month impasse over providing emergency funding to fight Zika through toughened mosquito control, other prevention steps and development of a vaccine.
Sens. Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio were pushing their peers to finalize a deal that would include $1.1 billion in Zika funds in broader spending bill to fund the federal government into December.
Nelson, whose state has most of the Zika cases in the continental United States, rushed to the Senate floor to announce the good news.
“I am here to share with the Senate that I think we have finally found a path forward to fund the fight against Zika,” Nelson said in a speech.
Nelson said that extraneous provisions on health insurance, Planned Parenthood and abortion, which had stalled the legislation after House Republicans added them, would not be in the omnibus measure.
Citing the 756 Zika cases in his state, Nelson said: “I can tell you that the people in Florida are pretty agitated.” The number had risen to 771 by day’s end.
Rubio was reaching out to House lawmakers in an effort to forestall the kind of 11th-hour shenanigans that unraveled an earlier Zika deal in June and again last week.
“As I’ve told members in both the House and the Senate, Zika is not a game,” Rubio said in late afternoon. “We need to pass this funding as soon as possible so our health officials and experts have the resources they need to conduct vital medical research and eradicate Zika in Florida.”
Zika funding has been stalled for seven months since President Obama sent Congress a $1.9 billion package.
There were signs of progress on other fronts.
At a White House meeting earlier Monday, President Barack Obama met with congressional leaders and urged them to approve Zika funding along with money for disaster relief in Louisiana and Michigan.
“Even though I know we’re in the midst of a political season and everybody is thinking about elections, there’s still business to be done, and I was encouraged by some of the constructive work that’s being done right now,” Obama told top Republicans and Democrats.
Saying that keeping the government open beyond the Sept. 30 end of the current fiscal year is his top concern, Obama said his next priority is “to adequately fund our efforts to not only deal with the Zika outbreaks, but also come up with diagnostic tools and vaccines that will solve the problem for good.”
After the meeting, House Speaker Paul Ryan said it had gone well.
“The leaders discussed their desire to reach a speedy resolution on the short-term spending bill, including funding for the Zika virus,” a Ryan aide, who requested anonymity in order to summarize a closed session, told reporters.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s top Republican, signaled a breakthrough at the start of the week’s session by filing a stopgap measure to fund the government through Dec. 9.
Citing “a lot of important progress already,” McConnell specified that the omnibus bill, called a continuing resolution, would “include funding for Zika control and for our veterans,” two contentious issues that had blocked previous appropriations measures.
As I’ve told members in both the House and the Senate, Zika is not a game.
Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican
Significantly, while the measure would fund discretionary government operations for less than one-quarter of the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, Senate aides said it contains the full $1.1 billion in Zika funds that the Senate originally approved in May.
That amount was less than the $1.9 billion Obama had requested in February, but more than the $622 million provided in a House measure.
The apparent breakthrough came three days after Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said his agency was “essentially out of money” to combat Zika.
Americans, Frieden warned, “are about to see a bunch of kids born with microcephaly” in the coming months.
Microcephaly, which causes abnormally small heads and brains in newborns, is the worst of several birth defects that can result from a pregnant woman becoming infected with Zika. Seventeen babies in the continental United States have been born with microcephaly this summer, including an infant born to a woman who traveled from Haiti to Florida in June to deliver her child.
The virus, which has ravaged Brazil and Puerto Rico, is carried mainly by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito but can also be transmitted via sexual intercourse with an infected person.
The National Institutes of Health has started human trials on a vaccine against Zika, but the agency says it has had to borrow money earmarked for other programs and is also about to run out of funds.
James Rosen: 202-383-6157; Twitter: @jamesmartinrose
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